Center Story

Germantown Graduate Students Represent Union University Well at Regional Research Conference

November 9, 2011 - Graduate students from the School of Education’s Germantown, TN campus represented Union University well at this year’s annual meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association (MSERA). The MSERA conference was held on the campus of the University of Mississippi, located in Oxford, MS on November 2-4, 2011. Three current graduate students and one recent alumnus made presentations. Lakishia N. Robinson presented The Administrator’s Effect on Teacher Turnover, while J. B. Blocker delivered a session on The Effect of the Positive Behavior Intervention and Support Program on the Academic Achievement and Exclusionary Consequences of African American Male Freshmen. Likewise, Abasi H. McKinzie presented on The Effects of Multiple Assessments of the Discovery Education Assessment on Teacher Self-Efficacy of Eighth-Grade Mathematics Teachers. As a recent graduate of Union’s doctoral program, Dr. Momodou Keita co-authored a paper with his dissertation chair, Dr. Stephen R. Marvin. The topic of the presented paper was Examination of the Effects of the Response to Intervention Program on the Reading Achievement Test Scores of Third Grade English as Second Language Students.

Another alumnus of Union’s doctoral program, Dr. Vinson Thompson, is currently serving as the Tennessee representative on the MSERA board of directors. Dr. Thompson spoke very highly of Dr. Momodou Keita’s work by saying, “I am exceptionally proud of a particular participant I saw today from Union University. As a board of directors’ member from MSERA, I have seen a lot of presentations– probably two to three hundred different ones – over the last four to five years, and I will say that that was an outstanding job. It had all of the rigor that it should have in a professional paper, and a lot of props to those people that were responsible for preparing that gentleman for this caliber of presentation.” Dr. Keita was not the only one to receive special recognition for his work as a current doctoral student; Abasi H. McKinzie was publically recognized during the conference’s annual business meeting. McKinzie won an award and public recognition for his work. Union faculty members, Drs. Ben T. Phillips and Eric D. Marvin, also attended the conference in support of Union’s graduate students. The Mid South Educational Research Association (MSERA) celebrated its 40 th annual conference this year by returning to the location of its first meeting location. This conference proved to be not only successful for the research organization itself, but also as a meaningful opportunity for Union University graduate students.

Drs. Momodou Keita and Stephen Marvin at the MSERA conference

Related Web Resource: http://www.msera.org/